According to linguist John Algeo in his essay <<Language Myths>>, (Penguin Press, 1999), he points out that many American forms of pronunciation are older than British ones.
For example, standard American English has retained the pronunciation of the final “r” in words like “father” and “mother,” while British has lost it. Americans have maintained the “flat a” sound of cat in words like “path” and “class” whereas the British have replaced this sound with the “broad a” of “father.”
Americans also fully pronounce all syllables of words like “library” and “dictionary,” but the British shorten them to “libr'ry” and “diction'ry.” Algeo shows us that in all of these examples and many more, the American variation is closer to the original sixteenth century version than the British one.
Modern English really starts with Chaucer, who marks a break between earlier English (with strong Saxon, Angle, and Norse roots) and the language of the Home Counties (which borrowed heavily from Norman French, both in vocabulary and grammar).
American English has evolved much less than British English since the Founding Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock; so it retains many elements of Early Modern English (Fall for Autumn, Gotten as a past participle, Digged in many American dialects). So American English is closer to early forms of Early Modern English (the language of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Chaucer).
Much of American English is older than British English. In fact, some words such as ‘pavement (In the American sense),’ and 'fall (to mean the season),’ which are generally regarded as American terms, are simply holdovers from Middle English. As well, in most cases where Americans “dropped” the U, the American spelling predates the British one. 'Favor’ is centuries older than 'favour,’ for instance.
Is it in fact British English which has diverged from that of our ancestors and does American English bear the greater weight of antiquity?
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